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Welcome to the LinuxFocus July/August 2003 issue

Linux has always been about the sharing of knowledge and the freedom to look at the source code, the freedom to learn from it and to change it according to your needs, the freedom to use it where and in every way you please...

At the moment it seems however that more and more people try to enter the Linux arena who not only know nothing about morals and good manners but also don't care the least about the spirit of Linux. Money is all that counts.

Are the times gone when programmers happily wrote their code and met during small conferences while now the people in suits are taking over not knowing better than fighting about Linux in the court room?

The world is constantly changing and so is Linux. If it is for good or for bad only the future will show but as long as there are still people out there living its spirit and willing to make Linux the best possible operating system I am in good hopes that its original spirit will still live on after those people in suits have long left the stage again!

-- Katja Socher --

LinuxFocus.org Articles

Graphics

Going 3D with Blender: Very first steps , by Katja Socher

Blender is an open source 3D graphics program. In this first article in a series about Blender we look at the very basics and build a stage with sphere and cube in it.

Applications

A GNUstep "small apps" tour , by Georges Tarbouriech

This is a very short review of some of the smaller but very useful tools from GNUstep.

Product Review: Textmaker , by Guido Socher

The word-processor Textmaker is now also available for Linux. Let's see how good it really is.

System Administration

IDS - Intrusion Detection System, Part II , by Klaus Müller

In this article we present methods to detect an intrusion and explain possibilities to respond to such and attack.

Book Review: Mastering Red Hat Linux 9 , by Josef Schwarz

This is a review of the book Mastering Red Hat Linux 9. by Jang, Michael, Sybex.

Articles at Linux Gazette

The MailBag
More 2-Cent Tips
The Answer Gang
News Bytes
By Michael Conry
HelpDex
By Shane Collinge
Ecol
By Javier Malonda
select() on Message Queue
By Hyouck "Hawk" Kim
Linux to Save the Health of the World
By Janine M Lodato
My Open Radio
By Mark Nielsen
Setting up the mail subsystem in Linux
By Ben Okopnik
Qubism
By Jon "Sir Flakey" Harsem

Software Development

GUI Programming with GTK - part 2 , by Özcan Güngör

This is the second part in the GTK series. This time we will discuss boxes and tables.

Hardware

A 1 Bit Data Scope , by Bob Smith

This article describes a 1bit logic analyser which samples data and sends it to a Linux PC via the rs232 port.

Building an autonomous light finder robot , by Katja and Guido Socher

In this article we describe how to build an autonomous robot with a microcontroller that will always try to walk to the brightest spot.

The LinuxFocus Tip

If you own a digital camera then you probably had already the problem that you wanted to print 50 or more images on photo paper. You did not what to print them with 1 image per page instead you want them smaller: 2 images or 4 images per A4 (or US Letter) page. It's a lot of work to go to an image manipulation program such as Gimp and combine manually 4 images onto one page in order to print them. ImageMagick (www.imagemagick.org) and its "montage" command can do this for you automatically:

montage -quality 95 -borderwidth 10 -bordercolor white -tile 2x2 -geometry 1600x1200 -page A4 image1.jpg image2.jpg image3.jpg image4.jpg result.jpg

Now you just print result.jpg. ImageMagick can also generate postscript directly but the quality is not as good as the one generated by Gimp. It is therefore better to print result.jpg from Gimp.

Here is a perl script called combine4images (download: combine4images.txt) that can run over a directory and combine hundreds of images into 4 images per page and generate combined images in landscape and portrait format.

[Note: just in case that ImageMagick changes the API: This has been tested with ImageMagick version 5.4.3]

Happy printing.